[Announce] New addon NeedsUpgrade released

I've written a new addon which I've called NeedsUpgrade. Its a fairly simple addon that colour codes your equipment on the character screen so you can see at a glance which items are the lowest level ones you have.

Description:

It can be a pain to remember on your character, or worse across multiple characters, which items of gear are in most need of an upgrade.

This addon is fairly simple it looks at your equipped items and colour codes each item on the character sheet using the familiar colour scheme seen with quests and mobs etc. as follows :

Red : Item is a lot better than average items equipped
Orange : Item is better than average items equipped
Yellow : Item is around the average items equipped
Green : Item is worse than the average items equipped
White : Item is a lot worse than the average items equipped.

So at a glance on your character sheet you can see which items are green and white and thus are most in need of an upgrade. This could be very useful whilst trying to get higher item levels to qualify for that next raid tier, or whilst levelling to see what gear is needing an upgrade. Also for just a general quick glance to see what you might want to spend those valor points on next.

Example of levelling character showing his headpiece and gloves are his best items in red and his boots are his worst item in white.

They are orange in game because they are harder for your level (or you have worse chance of completing due to your level). Its not red because its higher in general, only harder comparably to your level.

Red or orange are often use to denote something as bad (Item tooltips showing red if you aren't high enough level for example). It makes sense that red would be used for bad as it is in WoW.

Looking at your screen shot I would immediately assume that green was good and red was bad. It just makes sense.

I think its a great idea though and you can expand on it quite easily as well.

Edit the tooltips so that if the item is very below or below average, they will display the location of level appropriate drops or rewards. 1 for each part of WoW.

Y Item Name - 550 Honor (Honor Vendor Dude)
X Item Name - Boss (Instance)
Z Item Name - Quest Name *level specific zone quest. You could even check what quests the user is doing to see which zone they are in to give them upgrade possibilities from where they are questing already.

In the initial incarnation ie: v1.00 the display will be this way. I'll add various colour options for the next version including the ability to set your own fully customisable colour scheme, which should be useful for making the colours stand out on different monitor types.

On reflection I can see why red would be bad and green good. I've used a 5 colour scale. On this scale what would be the 5 colours bad through to good? I'm thinking its best avoiding blue/purple/legendary orange etc to avoid confusion letting the user think the colour refers to item rarity.

Thanks for the suggestions clampy, they would be a bit tricky to implement without replicating the work of addons like AtlasLoot, Grail etc. However an optional dependency is a good idea. ie: if you have those addons that tell you where to get gear my addon could pickup that info and display it in the tooltip. If you didn't have the addon that gave the data it wouldn't update the tooltip. ie: Optional reliance on another addon. If the user wants that functionality they can have it by installing the addon that supplies the data.

Where the data exists in game. ie: you can query the server for the info then thats a lot easier to add without any reliance, optional or otherwise on someone else's addon.

Yes I know that. I'd suggest people try it. It is remarkably intuitive that red is high level, yellow is mid level and green is low level.

If you think of the colours as how high level your gear is then red is the highest level, and green/white is lowest. The whole ethos in WoW with colours is that "greens are bad". To use green as good just seemed counter intuitive.

That said, I'll have a new version out soon that allows you to select you own colour scheme, or select from some defaults. I'd appreciate suggestions as to what the defaults should be.

A nice simple add-on for some people it seems, though, the red makes me think broken gear. personally, I wouldn't have much use for this, as I generally know which pieces are lower than others , though if you added what was suggested in a future update(mouse-over or even a separate menu to quickly show you what class/spec appropriate upgrades are and where they are from) This could become another "famous" add-on. Even so much as letting you save upgrades you want, so you don't have to look through atlas/dungeon journal to remember where they are from exactly would be very nice, also adding customization for colors and such would be rather nice.

Using the site http://colorbrewer2.org/ I thought about a divergent colour scheme and came up with two that seem ok a standard green/red scale and one that was safe for those that are colour blind.

---------- Post added 2013-02-25 at 03:37 PM ----------

Originally Posted by Junkdepot

I was just checking the add-on out. Why does it download as RAWR instead of NeedsUpgrade? The files contained within are the correct ones, but you might want to change the folder name to match.

Can you explain the process you used to check the addon out? Also where you see it say Rawr please. I based the core Ace3 code on my Rawr addon so I may have left some bits behind. I just need to know where to look.

AH ok spotted it. The SVN checkin name is wrong. Thus the file build name is wrong. I can fix that this evening. Thanks for the report.

---------- Post added 2013-02-25 at 11:12 PM ----------

New version 1.10 release with user defined colour selectors and 3 built in defaults.